Press

Press

May 30 2007

Issued by Mattison Public Relations

Sweet & Maxwell complete major redesign of their market leading Westlaw UK service

  • The New Westlaw UK - Overwhelmingly positive customer feedback
  • Market leading online legal information service now BlackBerry compatible

Sweet & Maxwell has just launched the new Westlaw UK. Following a major redesign the latest version, now compatible with BlackBerry, allows legal professionals access to a wealth of information from the UK, EU, US and other international legal jurisdictions wherever they are.

Andrew Buckley, Westlaw UK Business Manager says: “The redesign represents the next generation of online legal information services and combines leading content with a fast, precise and intuitive research experience. We are delighted with the overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers with comments such as “Do you know how long I’ve waited for a legal service like this?” and “At last an online service that works in a similar manner to my brain”.

Sweet & Maxwell’s development teams devoted a combined 17,604 days to the redesign, working closely with customers from across the legal profession. The result has been:

  • A service that significantly speeds up and improves the legal research process
  • Better navigation and search tools and a much more intuitive web based experience
  • Research solutions that can be customised to an organisation’s or individual’s needs
  • Unprecedented levels of functionality

Andrew Buckley explains: “The redesign was defined by what our customers wanted, how lawyers work in the UK and how they want to access legal and business information.”

The latest Westlaw package features tools such as:

  • Powerful case law and legislation analysis services that enable lawyers to identify in one easy-to-view document all the direct and indirect legal materials relating to a case or piece of legislation
  • A fully browseable table of contents offering the most direct access to key content
  • The new ‘Point-in-Time’ searching enabling lawyers to see how a particular law stood on a specific day in the past or how that provision has changed over time
  • A ‘breadcrumb trail’ tracking every research step to help with complicated research projects
  • Advanced search templates which have been further enhanced to maximise usability
  • Compatibility with BlackBerry devices – particularly important as 24/7 mobile online access becomes so business critical

The time-travel feature is helpful, for example, in professional negligence cases, where arguments will be based on the law as it stood at the time of the alleged negligence.

Aimed at making life easier and research quicker for the legal profession, the new Westlaw UK has also introduced status icons for cases and legislation which indicate to users whether a law has been superseded or is still ‘good’ law.

Sweet & Maxwell’s, a Thomson business (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC), decision behind the redesign began with the objective to help users extract maximum value from the depth of Westlaw UK’s content. Westlaw UK holds over 195,000 law reports dating back to 1865 and fully consolidated legislation dating back to 1267.

Andrew Buckley adds: “Westlaw UK has collated a wealth of information from the most authoritative of sources but what sets this latest version apart is that it makes it easier and faster to access the content and put it to practical use.”